Error: cannot allocate a vector of 39.00GB

[andresrcs]

Here is a nice answer on a related topic about dealing with large datasets on R

Rstudio, is it useable for large data sets (9gb+)?

This is a really common question and I think we might need to write up a FAQ because it's both important and frequently asked. Typically when asked online you get answers like what you see here which reduce to: use data.table use a database "chunk" your data (in combination with a database and/or with base R) But this lacks enough color to help you understand why these work or when to use each approach. As a pedantic point, RStudio is not consuming your RAM, it's R which is. RStudio is just the IDE we're using to control R. So in R (and Python and many other languages as well) you can only operate on as much data as they can fit in memory. Which feels, at first glance, like a tough c…

To summarise you have another options as using more RAM efficient libraries like data.table or change your approach to out of memory solutions like sql databases.